


lux aeterna

by Anonymous



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fallen London, M/M, POV Second Person, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:58:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The Seeking Road need not be walked alone.





	lux aeterna

**Author's Note:**

> its been 2 yrs and smen still makes me very very smad

 

 

You own something valuable: a golden key on a leather cord with sunlight trapped within. Years ago it belonged to your parents, adventurers who embarked on a journey to the Surface and never returned; to your sister they left the deed to your tiny flat, to you, the sunlight-key. Now you wear it around your neck under your tunic, away from prying eyes or thieving hands, and sometimes on quiet nights when the false-stars are bright you pull the key out and tip it on its side, and watch the light spark and flow through the crystal hollow.

When you were fourteen, your grandmother passed away. She was the last among your family who recalls the Surface, and as she exhaled her last lungful of air, you opened your key and let the precious sunlight wash over her. It illuminated her thin worn face with the truth of cycles, the Law and the Sequence, and unidirectional time; and she closed her eyes against that blinding brilliance, and unlike everyone who dies in the Neath, she did not open them again.

You had snapped shut the key still half-full of sunlight, and wondered very much about it.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Fifteen years old, washing dishes in the back of the Singing Mandrake one slow afternoon while your sister serves drinks. A boy not much older than you slips into the backroom and presses several pieces of rostygold into your hands, and asks you to help him with a friend who got a little too drunk in a honey-den. You are worried; there are stories of children who follow strangers and don’t return. But the boy seems to mean no ill will, so you dry your hands on a rag, and take the red-gold pieces from him and tuck them carefully into a pocket and say, “Let’s go.”

Between you both you hoist the unconscious boy through the Veilgarden streets and to their shared quarters in a stuffy bookshop attic on the fringes of Ladybones; deposit him onto the thin mattress on the floor, and then look at each other. The boy with the rostygold tells you that his name is Nasch, and his friend’s name is Vector. He asks you yours and you answer truthfully. He nods, stiffly thanks you for your help, and shows you the door.

You think you won’t see them again. Then you think better, and stop by later in the evening to bring them both a warm bite from the Mandrake’s kitchens. When Nasch offers to pay you again, you say, “It’s fine. My employer won’t miss it.”

Nasch’s eyes narrow. “I don’t like it when I take something and give nothing back. Name a price.”

You think about the Mandrake: about desire and appetite. You have seen their power and their guise, but you are still too young to know want. The sunlight-key is warm under your tunic, over your heart, and as you extend your hand you try to put some of that warmth into your smile.

 “The pleasure of your friendship?” you reply.

 

 

 

 

Vector recovers, little by little. The first evening you take him a medicinal draught of two parts mushroom wine, one part honey; it is supposed to soothe dreams, but he takes a sip and then pushes it away, looking rather ill. “I don’t want to touch that stuff if I can.”

So you put the concoction away, and talk to him about your day instead. The Mandrake was busy that afternoon, as the Medusa’s Head was undergoing repairs and the late afternoon crowd of ne’er-do-wells from the Wolfstack Docks piled into the Veilgarden bars instead for their day’s alcohol. You tell an unsavory joke you heard and Vector laughs far too loud, then quickly shuts his mouth and looks for your reaction, like he’s afraid he has done something wrong. He is like that, you think: a little bright-eyed, a little reckless, a little too curious. Places rather a low value on his own life. But that’s fine. You’ll be there to catch him again, next time.

The door unlatches, the slide of the metal bolt loud, and then there is the sound of boots in the hall. You stand; since Nasch is back, your presence is no longer needed here. But Vector catches your hand and you whirl around in surprise, and he just smiles at you and squeezes your fingers with his own. “Hey, Yuuma. Will I see you again?”

“Sure,” you say, and squeeze his hand back.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Seventeen years old, waiting tables on busy weekend evenings when the Mandrake needs a helping hand. There have been strange occurrences in Veilgarden of late: court-ladies with strange appetites, Flit-urchins who drag sacks of flawed jewels behind them to pay for candles or a leg of plated seal. A self-possessed gentleman who, beneath the eyes of the crowded room, consumed his own pet bat. Everyone in the kitchens had stayed late to scrub the floors that night.

Nasch has taken up studying the Correspondence; he consorts with scholars at the university, piles his desk with teetering stacks of books, singed parchment weighted down with gant inkwells that he shoves under his desk when you call on him. “It’s fine, I can’t read it,” you say, but he does it anyway, and refuses to let you in the study until every scrap of parchment is safely stowed away. Vector has far too short an attention-span for study, but he spends long days in the bowels of the Forgotten Quarter checking Correspondence-ciphers against Nasch’s borrowed notes by hand; he returns in the evening with hair singed and forearms covered in cat-scratches, eyes bright with knowledge he should not possess.

Before long Vector begins to exhibit the symptoms of the mysterious hunger-affliction sweeping London, and in his idle hours Nasch ties him to the post of his own bed so he cannot wander or injure himself. Some evenings when you have time off, you call on him to bring food and alleviate the boredom. As you ladle soup onto his plate, he catches your wrist in a deathgrip and draws you close. “A name,” he whispers, eyes fever-bright. “They’re looking for a name.”

“Who’s looking?” you ask. “What name?”

Vector shakes his head. “Get a chair, okay? I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.“

So you pull a stool from the kitchen and sit by his bed and listen to him talk, on and on and on about the damp night and the Wax-Wind that sweeps through the Neath. “Do you know what it is like to want something,” he says abruptly, when he pauses to draw breath. You think about eyeing the last slice of bread in the pantry, or dropping a penny in the well in the town square and wishing for your father to come home from adventuring. But that doesn’t seem to be what Vector is asking about, so you shake your head no.

He continues quietly, “You never think about anything else.”

He tells you about echoes in dark places and secrets spilt over the mouths of wells,  Correspondence-stories written on the crumbling pillars of the Forgotten Quarter that would make the Shuttered Palace’s most celebrated authors squirm. Stories of people, nations, worlds past and present, but nothing of his, and nothing of yours. He tells you, and tells you, and tells you until the candle has burnt low on his writing-desk and the streetlamps have flickered on outside the window, and you realize how late it is.

“I’m sorry,” Vector says, and in the near-complete darkness you cannot see the expression on his face. “I am sorry, Yuuma.“

Your soul is no heavier or lighter than it is before. “Sorry for what?” you hear yourself say.

His lips tighten. “This curse, it spreads like an infection. Now that I have told you. Like this, you, also—“

With that you refuse to hear any more. You stand, chair making no noise as it scrapes the carpet, and leave with hands empty and heart cold.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes you dream of a sun you have never seen. Father used to tell you that on the Surface there is a circle that hangs in the sky, so bright it hurts to look at, and so hot that it warms up the whole world. Your sister remembers Surface-light, and describes it as candle-flame that burns steadier and longer than anything in the Neath, and will not go out until the world itself ends. She misses it, but only just. If either of you ascended to the Surface now, you would burn away like parchment in a fire.

Under your tunic and over your heart is the sunlight-key, radiance softened through layers and layers of crystal. You tip it on its side, and watch the glimmer ebb and flow through the hollow within.

You put it away, and in the pitch-darkness of your room you wait for the hunger, but it does not come. Each morning you go to work, and each evening on the way home you slide a package of food through the cat flap in Nasch’s door, and the hunger does not come. In the Mandrake’s kitchens when Alit the cook is otherwise occupied, you nibble at the edge of a slab of raw meat as you have seen the Seekers do, and pull back your tongue in repulsion at the taste.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The walls are wrong. The walls are wrong. The Manager of the Royal Beth speaks to Vector with infinite gentleness, to you with wry conviction as you hand over the payment for his convalescence. “I know what mad looks like,” the Manager tells you. “And he’s not mad. No one is, who comes here looking for the Name.”

 Your chest clenches with despair. “Then what—“

The Manager smiles gently. “Have you ever wanted something so much, you would do anything to have it?”

You think about Vector asking you the same thing. You think about mother and father departing, cloaked and hatted into a hansom-cab whose wheels rattled over cobblestone. You think about your sister altering her dresses on the second day of her employment; about streetlamps in dark alleys, and rubbery men in the road. You think about Nasch, the day he pressed coins into your hand and asked you for help. “No,” you say. “I don’t know. But I think I understand.”

Beside you, Vector does not raise his eyes. You do not know if he hears you. The Manager smiles again, lips twisting under the wide-brimmed hat. “You know, that man doesn’t deserve you. But that’s also why he needs you most.”

 

 

 

 

Nasch returns from his outing to the forbidden opera at the Panopticon, head held high, eyes bright with an emotion you cannot place. As he sheds his cloak and coat you see a Correspondence symbol seared in gant ink on the inside of his forearm. _Hope._ The only one you know how to read.

When you ask after the Lady in Lilac, he replies, “She asked me what love is.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that love is that which persists when there is nothing left to love.” Nasch looks at Vector, curled up on his side and seemingly asleep, wrists and ankles rubbed raw from the restraining ropes. Then he looks at you. “The first night after he came back from that madhouse, he asked me to let him go.”

“Will you?”

“Should I?”

You nod. “Yes. For his sake. I have to go home. Goodnight, Nasch.”

The chair scrapes as you stand; the fire crackles on the hearth. He sees you to the door, and the wind through the Veilgarden streets is warm and silent.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The Mandrake is becoming suspicious of disappearing food stores, the blame for which cannot all be foisted on unruly customers. In terrible fascination you take him a rat, see him sink his teeth into its neck and drain it dry, then gnaw at the bloodied fur over its throat. Part of you is horrified, repulsed. The other part watches him consume, the knowledge of it heavy on your heart alongside a strange certainty that even like this, he will not hurt you.

 _I am so hungry,_ Vector tells you, eyes wild like Correspondence-fire, and pulls you to him. His mouth closes over yours, and the taste of rat blood on his teeth makes your stomach heave. It is dark in Vector’s room; through his cracked-open door, Nasch’s shadow passes through the hall, and if he knows you are there, then he does not show it.

Appetite takes many forms, and the soiled sheets can be taken care of the morning. You pull Vector to you and whisper words of reassurance into his hair. His tears are warm against your skin, viscous like resin.

 

 

 

One evening you open the Mandrake’s back door to toss out the garbage, and a thin and night-black cat slinks up to you. It stares up with bulbous yellow eyes and mews, short and loud; eyes wide, teeth sharp, the hollow cave of its stomach heaving with breath. It reminds you of Vector, for some reason.

That night as you traipse back home through Veilgarden’s silent streets, lamplight softened by the fog that never lifts, the cat follows you all the way, and when you open your front door you hold it open a little longer and let it slip through. You pull the desiccated rat-corpses from last year’s infestation from the dry cupboard; scatter them in the middle of your hall, and watch the cat eat and eat and eat until its stomach is heavy and distended with them. Watch it pad over to your fire and curl up on the rug; purrs contentedly, and you sit cross-legged next to it and scratch it behind the ears until the fire burns low.

You leave it by the embers when you retire for the night. The next morning, even though you have not opened the door or any windows, the cat is gone, as if it had never been around at all. But the pile of rats in the dry cupboard is half the size it had been the day before, and tiny piles of rat-bones decorate the carpet in the living room still.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The third time Vector commits suicide, you know exactly where to go to find him, and cut your own hands on the floating glass as you drag his unmoving body from the well. Your blood, his blood, the stagnant muck at the bottom of the chasm: it all mingles together like that much waste. Purity cannot grow out of dirt. _Live,_ you think, as you seal your mouth over his again and taste soil and well-water, press the heels of your hands into his chest. _Live, for my sake._

Candles made of wax and cotton; red threaded through the white, like his eyes. You are with him as he dies and dies and dies, and every time he opens his eyes you whisper “Let me help,” and as he nods yes you clean his wounds of cat-fur and river-dirt and metal rust, and swipe away your tears before they fall on scarred skin.

“Better?” you ask, when he has regained consciousness.

He pushes you away irritably. “Go help someone else. London has no shortage of—“

You catch his arm; in this state, he is too weak to refuse. “You’re my friend,” you say, and put a finger to his lips. “I won’t leave you.”

Hollow laughter, like wind under stone eaves. “To do this, I must give up everything. If you love something, let it…“

You cover his mouth with your own to swallow the words. “If it comes back, it’s yours forever,” you finish for him. At his back, the stones of the Forgotten Quarter are moss-damp and cold. There is history here. What was forgotten? What was lost?

Hope is persistence, and the will to act on the genuine belief that success is possible.

“I’m not leaving,” you say, and press a kiss to his water-stained hair. “I’m not going anywhere, Vector.”

(But the sound of his name on your lips is wrong, like the whistling of wind across the statues of the Forgotten Quarter.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

On the night of All Hallows’ Eve a cloaked figure raps smartly at your door. Your sister is still downtown serving drinks at a party; you are alone in the house, so you peer through the crack and ask who it is and who they’re looking for. The woman pushes back the hood of her cloak and introduces herself as an assistant of the Masters. You carefully lock the door to every room in the house, then invite her in and offer her a cup of eggnog.

“Thank you, you’re very kind,” the masked assistant says, as she removes the cloak and the scarf she had held to her face. “You do understand that precisely because you are kind, you will definitely suffer?”

You nod. “I know.”

(It is not naïveté, and you are not a stranger to the dark space between chambers in a heart kept away from the sun too long. Sometimes, people must break their promises. You understood this the day that gentleman from the Palace left your sister crying on the Mandrake’s dance floor, and walked through the doors with tears in his eyes. You accept the possibility of being betrayed, and you accept the possibility of being left behind. You choose to believe anyway.)

The Master’s assistant nods, and presses her parcel— a bundle of expensive silks –into your arms. “A gift, courtesy of Mr Veils, on the condition that you have nothing more to do with the Seeker.”

You politely refuse.

“Nothing good will come of this,” she says and stands to leave, and you see her off as she pulls her cloak tight around her shoulders with the parcel under her arm and steps out again into the night.

A half-hour later a tiny bat alights on your doorstep, wings folded tight against its thin body as it shivers from the cold, and you wonder what compelled it to fly so far from the Flit on a night like this. You open the door a crack and the creature scrambles in; perches on the pail of Neath-snow you have set beside the coat-rack in the hall and looks at you.

“Go ahead,” you say, though you have very little notion of what a bat would want with it.

The bat prods at the pail’s contents with a small claw, and the snow sizzles and burns at the touch. You watch as it dips its head to drink and emerges unharmed. Then it perches beside the window and waits for you to open it, then flies off again into the night.

 

 

 

That night, you dream of a candle whose flame is steady and bright. If it were placed outside, it might light up the Neath-sky, or warm the whole world. You watch it burn down, shrinking notch by notch until it is only a fraction of its original size.

“—It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” There is someone with you, standing in the shadows so you cannot see their face. The voice is Vector’s, but also not, and as the candle flickers in a sudden wind you take his hand in yours.

"A long time ago in the Neath,” Vector says, “there was a man who loved candles. Their warmth, their light. He made a living by selling the candles he made himself from wax and cotton, and everyone who bought them would say how good they are, how warm and bright.

“But the man knew that one day he would die, and then there would be no one left to make candles to warm the world. So he cut open his own neck, and filled his own spine with wax, so that he would continue to give light for as long as he could.”

“That’s a terrible way to go,” you say.

“Is it? He went doing what he wanted.”

“What happened to him?”

“No one remembers him now. He had entrusted the disposal of his body with a friend, but that person reneged on his promise. The candle was taken with the trash and dumped in the Unterzee.”

_There will be nothing left of you, just as there is nothing left of him._

“But you remember him, don’t you?” you say. “And now I do, too. Like that, he lives on.”

The candle flickers then, and Vector’s hand tightens imperceptibly in yours as it goes out.

 

 

* * *

 

                      

 

Nasch informs you of Vector’s intention to travel to the Cave of the Nadir, hands clenching in the soft material of his coat. “I said I’d follow him anywhere.” _But not that far._

“He doesn’t want anyone to,” you hear yourself say.

“But you will?”

You nod. “I love him.”

(When your father announced his intention to climb the Travertine Spiral, no one else at the table said a word. Grandma looked at sis, who looked at mom who looked at you, and you had looked at dad and said nothing, hands clasping the rough wood of your chair. Later, you peered through the crack of your sister’s ajar bedroom door and saw your mother pressing a sheaf of papers into your sister’s hands.)

Nasch nods. “Then don’t regret it.”

 

 

 

 

In that place where the forgetting light lives, one by one faces disappear, lost beneath dark water. You hold on to Vector’s hand so that neither of you can leave the other.

“When I am gone,” Vector says, in a voice not his own, “will you hate? Or will you grieve?”

He has turned away so that you cannot see his face, but you remember every line and contour of him, and always will. “I don’t know,” you say sincerely. You think about the thin cat that curled up on your hearth-rug, stomach silent for the first time in centuries; the bat that alighted on your doorstep, shivering with cold, and accepted your offering of Neath-snow. You squeeze his hand in yours, so tightly it must hurt, but he is the more tolerant between you where pain is concerned.

 “Please, go," he says. "While you still remember me.”

“I’m not leaving you here.”

“I chose to do this, and the price is to give up everything. Including you.”

 “Even if that is true—“ The Seeking Road is paved with loss, but you are not a seeker. “You can’t give me up, because I was never yours. No one has the right to another. I’m here because I want to be and there is nothing you can do about it. And I will never, never let you go.”

The forgetting light does not care what it touches, but you close your eyes anyway and grasp his hands. “So, please, don’t ever ask me to leave you again.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Nasch signs over his ship – to you, not your friend. “You don’t trust him,” you observe.

“No. But I owe him. Much, much more than this.” Nasch shakes his head. “If—” He looks at your friend, waiting for you in the street by the hansom-cab, his hat pulled down so that you cannot see his red-rimmed eyes. “If, at the gates, he chooses to turn back. No matter what, he will always have a home here.”

He presses a compass and a book into your hands, and does not meet your eyes. “—Let him know,” he says, then closes his door against the cold of the Neath-night.

 

 

 

The compass Nasch gave you does not point true; in your hands it spins wildly and then settles on London; in his hands, it points to you. But you read the false-stars in the sky as your father taught you, and let your friend steer the way. Many times you both are waylaid by pirates and layabouts, but the look in your friend’s eyes is enough to spook them into departure without incident. It is the disposition of a man who will do anything to get what he wants, including the elimination of anything that stands in his way.

At every island he takes the life-raft and the satchel containing his sacrifices, and alights on the land alone; you drop anchor and send out a fishing-line, and wait with the ship amidst the calm seas. By the light of false-stars and the five saints’ candles, you read Nasch’s notebook. Stories and stories and stories and stories, the lessons of the false-saints and the fallen cities and the Drowned Man's hate; stories of what has come to pass and what will still come to pass, yet none of them his, and none of them yours. Stones in a rushing river, or candles in the wind.

At every island, when your friend returns, something imperceptible has changed. The seam on the back of his neck; his movement, his weight, cold air that wraps him like a veil. “What happened?” you always ask, and he always replies, “You don’t have to know. Let’s go.”

Here, in the belly of the broad Unterzee, there is no living thing for miles but the great behemoths that move beneath its dark and churning surface. You clasp the key in your hand, the last vestiges of radiance pooled in the tip, and twist it open. There is no chance you will need it again.

Pale sunlight illuminates you both from beneath, and your friend’s face is gaunt and bloodless in its glimmer. His fingers weave with yours, and even though the sea and sky are infinitely dark around you both, he is smiling.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

At the towering horizon-gates, you knock together.

As the gates open to the edgeless void beyond you keep him on his feet, support his weight with his hand in yours; the solar winds tear at your face and clothes and hair.

Before the radiance of the Judgments he falls to his knees and pulls out his own still-beating heart; unravels the inner walls to reveal the Message inscribed therein. In Correspondence there can be no lies or omissions, and the Void rings with the injustice the Drowned Man was dealt. An agreement, and a betrayal; of all that was, and all that is and will be. He must be remembered. He must have the payment of his debt—

(—but, and this you learned from a drunk tax collector your second night washing dishes at the Mandrake— there are two ways to erase a debt: recompense, and forgiveness. Amidst the cycles and cycles of broken promises, St Forthigan’s lesson, written on sea-damp parchment in Nasch’s narrow and looping hand: _There was no betrayal._ There was only desire, and its price: the cost that is known, and the cost that is not, but willingly paid all the same.)

The story told, your friend falls to his knees with his head bowed. Now the Judgments turn to you, and the radiance of their regard is blinding. But you are no stranger to sunlight. “I will return to the Fifth City,” you say to the Void where the Judgments lie in wait. “I will make sure he is remembered, not as he is, but as he used to be.”

The man without a name loved you enough to let you live, and in return, you will immortalize him in collective memory. The Judgments’ court rings with the silence of truth, and your hands around your fallen friend’s shoulders tighten with grief. He smiles up at you, genuine as his gratitude on the day you first met, and as his face fades into peaceful sleep for the first time in years you think – you have been trusted.

Trust is a promise you know how to keep.

You open your key again and trap his candlelight within. At once the weight of his soul settles over your heart; this is the burden he had carried across the stagnant seas, and with that knowledge your heart clenches tight with grief. The rope around your neck is no heavier or lighter than it had been.

The Judgments leave the ruin of your friend’s body to the Runt’s peers, consign the remains of his soul to the Void. The horizon-gates open before you again, as radiant as the first time, and leave you on the shallows with the ship moored in the wet sand and the Zee lapping at your feet.

 

 

 

 

You return to London alone, Nasch's compass in your hand, and the key around your chest that now bears candlelight instead of sunlight. The bat-swarms steer clear of your ship’s prow, the zee-beasts avoid your vessel, and as the ship pulls into port at the Wolfstack Docks the Wax-Wind passes through your hair to fill its sails.

You look for Nasch, who has made his own name in your long absence, and over tea and cakes in Veilgarden you tell him everything that came to pass since you left him. When you finish you hand him the candlelight-key, and his fingers tighten once round the crystal before he hands it back to you. He says nothing. There is nothing left that need be said.

Together you employ authors, poets, journalists, town-criers to spread the word as far and wide as you possibly can. London will know. London will know the name of the one who once was lost beneath dark water; London will know the name of that person you called friend. Lit by lamplight, the tavern-goers ask of the traveling bard: whose stories are these? The fallen Master’s? Your friend’s? Your own?

You shake your head. All those things are kept safe far beyond the horizon-gates.

You own something valuable: a golden key on a leather cord with candlelight trapped within. Years ago that light belonged to someone else, a boy with hair the colour of fire, a little bright-eyed, a little reckless, a little too curious. Now you wear his memory around your neck under your tunic, away from prying eyes or thieving hands, and sometimes on cold nights in the Singing Mandrake you tell that story to the patrons of the lost, and that light sparks and flows through the crystal hollow.

 

 

 

 


End file.
